Iulie Pana has published five poetry volumes over almost
twenty years. In 1996, she published The
Simple Image, which was awarded the debut prize at the y Sighet Poetry
Festival and after two years, The Statue for a Day. It was, however, The Scorpion Night from 2003 that
brought her the prize of the Dobrogea Branch of the Romanian Writers’
Association. In 2008, she explored the process of writing as a way of
understanding the passing of the time in Counter-seconds.
Her most recent volume, The Rule Made of
Air, is her most metaphoric of her volumes, probably because it is the most
autobiographic. Although it is not a narrative cycle and it does not rely on
the emotional transfer from the poetic subject to the poetic I, The Rule Made of Air is autobiographic
because it reveals what means to be a poet: the poet is the one who cares about
words and suffers when they become meaningless or clichéd, empty vessels of
conventional expression.

Iulia’s
poems recover the inherent lyricism of the everyday language and transforms
this recovery into the theme of the volume, as Ben Marcus did in his last novel
The Flame Alphabet. While Marcus
created a dystopian world in which the high toxicity of words killed people,
Iulia Pana reconstructs the world with words that she has already cleansed of
toxicity by extracting them out of idiomatic or fixed expressions, and by
giving them an unexpected context. The key for this reading of the volume is
the first poem, Experi/mental poetry,
which launches one of the recurrent themes: what it means to write poetry. More
than anything else, the poem is a self-portrait of a poet who sees a poetic
trace anywhere she turns her eyes. The imprint of a curved torso on a bed
sheet, a T-shirt that still shows the contour of a body like a mold, function
as graphemes of corporeal alphabet inscribed on white fabrics and surfaces that
become a sort of paper. Poetry is not simply written with a pen on paper; it is
written with bodies made of flesh and blood recorded by the poet.

Each
poem of the volume comes out of a metaphor that surprises the readers’
expectations. The Sleep Dealer is the
title of a poem in which the search for love coincides with the search of
unique expressions of love. The reading of the poem feels more like witnessing
a woman giving birth to a poem. The poet finds out that it is possible to
express sincere love only when she avoids using words which have been abused in
commercials or clichés. In her search for authenticity, Iulia creates
dissonances similar to dodecaphonic music only to bring it to a harmonious end.
In Shoes with High and Sharp Heels
she does the opposite: Iulia recharges poetically an empty metaphor, and
creates word games by reshuffling expressions that contain the word “shoe”.

Familiar
things are poetic, too. For example, a can of Coca-Cola is like a person whose
lungs are full of air which cannot be released. We all wear our labels on the
outside, proud of our identity. What if we believed that we were nothing but
some aluminum cans? What makes us different from goods? What saves us from
falling from our already fallen status even lower to the level of products for
sale? Iulia’s answer is “poetry”. Only poetry can make us different from any
other goods. As long as we are capable of writing and reading poetry we are allowing
poetry to reinvent us as pure beings.

Digitally
transcribed poetry can also record the way in which writing has changed because
of the new technology. The computer substitutes for calligraphy, which was, by
definition, poetic. Texts written on computers hide a mystery that entices the
poet to hack the code to get access to the pulsing heart. The bar code from I Cannot See Myself Anymore replaces the
superficial person with a reading device for which words are both palpable and
ineffable. In the era of social media, the words become feelings and a simple
click on the “like” button takes care of a second of emotion. Iulia makes the
reader beware of replacing real emotions with their hypertextual versions
whenever there is interaction on facebook and that’s why she strives to bring
emotion back into words.

Emotions
matter to Iulia. In Thin Thread, Nice
Memoire she appeals to our childhood memory in order to recover the
sediments of our innocence and with it, our lost poetic soul. The childrens’
bedtime song about a spider’s net on which one, two, then many more elephants
were swinging is the intertext that structures unconnected memories and
transforms them into a poem. There are not many literary intertexts in Iulia’s
poems, yet there is one in A Salty Drop which
recalls Eminescu’s Gloss. These two
completely different intertexts indicate the two extremes between which Iulia’s
poetry unravels: from the anonymity of a children’s song to the celebrity of a
national bard’s masterpiece. The huge spectrum of tones that she is able to
harmonize offers the reader addiction to her poems. With the second reading new
meanings, new connections, and new intertexts surface,
all increasing the self-reflexivity of the text.

The last
poem of the volume, a bolded line ended
the silence, is dedicated to writing. Wherever she looks Iulia sees
graphemes: streets, border stones, or palm lines. Writing is impregnated into
buildings and nature alike and as long as the poet makes sense of what she sees
she builds for her readers a poetic reality. Separating the real world from its
poetic version, writing is the realm where the two collide. Writing, thus, is
the skin of our universe. Just think, my reader, that Iulia Pana has the right
name for a poet: “pana” in Romanian means “quill” and “feather”. I prefer “quill,” because Iulia herself reflects the
gift of writing.

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Born in Constanta, Romania, Iulia Pana is a Romanian poet, visual artist, and TV journalist and producer. She holds Master's Degrees in Communication and Advertising (Bucharest, 2007) and Visual Arts (Ovidius University, Constanta, 2015). Since her literary debut in 1996, she has authored several volumes of poetry, drama, and scripts for TV and short movies, for which she has received various literary and communication industry awards.
She is a member of the Romanian Writers' Union, the Romanian Pro Journalists Union, and the Constanta Fine Artists Unions. Her international participations includes the International Biennial of Poetry (Belgium, 2003) and the Book Expo America (New York, USA, 2014).